I’m just imagining how Locus and Felix are both going to easily dodge Siris’s panicked objections at the beginning of the next episode:

“Locus! What the HELL are you playing at?! You just killed our ticket out of this!”

“He knew your wife’s name. Now he can’t tell anyone.”

“And
Felix! That call was a disaster! RAISING the ransom? Acting like we
were just a bunch of evil thugs?! It made everything worse!”

“You don’t get it, do you? That was the best call we could have had under those circumstances.”

“Wha–He knows everything! You were TERRIFIED!”

“Lozano
would have had men after us whether or not we called. Now we know that
they’re coming, led here by Gabriel’s corpse, so they can’t surprise us.
And, we also have an advantage: they’re not expecting you.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening. We should have just let him go.”

My Star Trek senses start tingling
whenever I see a new person–whom everyone seems to know–added to an
iconic group or involved in important events. I immediately begin
suspecting one of two things: memory manipulation (”I’m your old pal X
and I always have been!”) or time travel.

And given VIC’s opening
narration explicitly mentions the latter (albeit in a hypothetical
sense), I suspect Siris may have come back in time to stop Locus and
Felix from becoming the people who killed most of Chorus. In this case,
he probably wanted to kill them, but was unable to once he saw that they
were still just a couple of military veterans trying to make ends meet.
At this point, he may be trying to act as their group’s moral center
(by patiently dad-friending the crap out of them and telling them things
Good Partners Do) to keep them from going down their villainous path.

But
there’s a theme in RvB that the past can’t be changed, that attempts to
alter it directly only lead to the same conclusions (see Gamma’s
simulations with Alpha) and that bringing the past forward to rectify it
in the present only leads to an endless cycle of failure (see the “Tex
cycle” of the Church iterations). There hasn’t been any actual time
travel in RvB yet, with the exception of Wyoming’s TDU, but why not
start here, in the “try things out” season? Stopping the genocide of
Chorus seems a good enough motivation to me, and I think it would fit
with the Osiris reference as the god of rebirth, in that a successful
mission would lead to a whole lot of dead people no longer being dead.

However,
try as Siris might, he’s not going to keep Felix and Locus from
becoming villains–if anything, his presence here might become the
impetus for the very thing he’s trying to prevent. I think his death, in
particular, is going to accomplish that.

The way I see it,
Siris’s death has to accomplish two things: 1) it has to put Felix and
Locus on the path to villainy and 2) it has to make Felix afraid enough
of Locus that they start to gain the dynamic we see in the Chorus
trilogy, with Felix pulling out all the manipulative stops to keep Locus
on his side (and also, secretly, staving off the suspicion that Locus
may someday kill him).

With that in mind, I think Locus has to be
the one to accomplish the physical act of killing Siris, and I think
Felix has to convince Locus to do it, under the motivation of getting
Locus to kill Siris instead of him.

Given my suspicions on Siris’s
presence, I think this can be brought about by Felix and Locus
discovering Siris’s original purpose of coming to the past and killing
them. Perhaps Siris does the tropey time traveler thing and keeps a data
chip with him that displays a news story about the destruction of
Chorus, and how so many people were killed at the hands of two monstrous
“mercenaries,” and it falls out of his pocket or gets left out with
some personal effects.

I think Locus, in particular, would be
extremely disturbed by such a revelation, given his existing guilt of
the things he did in the war and the physical scar he bears in addition
to his mental and emotional ones. He’d probably go and confront Siris,
looking for answers–for reassurance that he wasn’t going to become a
monster. Siris, who is horrified that he’s been found out and really
doesn’t want to enrage Locus further, says something along the lines of
Felix being a bad influence, the real monster, not Locus…and isn’t it
convenient for Felix that he decided to follow Locus after Locus ran
off? Because he walks into the room just as Siris says that.

And,
of course, in a battle to manipulate Locus into doing one’s bidding,
Felix will always win. It doesn’t help that Siris’s original mission was
to kill them, and Felix plays the “we need to stick together, Locus”
angle for all it’s worth, stoking Locus’s anger at being “betrayed” by
Siris and convincing him that the real villain here is the person who
tried to kill two people who haven’t done anything wrong.

And
after Siris has been killed, Locus turns to leave on his own, to figure
things out for himself in this new level of brokenness caused by killing
a friend…

“Sam.” He keeps walking.

“Locus.” He stops. Turns. Felix is holding out his hand.

“You think this is going to get easier if you just go off on your own? You just killed somebody.
Do you really think you’re fit to make decisions right now?” A beat.
Felix sighs. “Look. I know you. You’re not a monster, and you never will
be. You’re a soldier, you–”

“–follow orders.”

“Yeah. So how
about, for now, we make sure you’re too busy being a soldier to be a
monster? We keep taking jobs, you keep taking orders. Do you trust me?”

Locus almost laughs, then becomes solemn. He takes Felix’s hand. “No. But let’s do it.”

Sure, it might just be convenience or because it’s funny, but humor
me for a bit and assume along with me that it serves a story purpose,
because I think that has potential.

Specifically, who might VIC be talking to, if not (merely) the audience on the other side of the fourth wall?

I think we can assume a few things about this hypothetical party:
that they have the resources available to find and go to Blood Gulch,
that they’re interested in the data VIC has stored (why else would they
listen to his rambling, geez), and that they know about as much about RvB as the audience does.

In short, this is probably someone looking for info on Project
Freelancer’s activities (probably someone who doesn’t already have
access to a storage facility), and whose prior knowledge of the “Red vs.
Blueniverse” comes mostly from the files Epsilon released as part of
his final transmission in RvB13 (or direct experience thereof).

A few options come immediately to mind:

A UNSC party looking for additional data in the case against Chairman Hargrove or the posthumous case against Director Church,

Employees of Charon Industries still out looking for anything related to PFL,

Sister (assuming she’s still in the canyon and really bored),

and Locus.

Notably, everyone except Sister here would likely be much more
interested in the data than they would be in preserving VIC, meaning
that they might just get to work dismantling him and transferring the
files they want instead of listening to him talk…

So what if this is a situation kind of like One Thousand and One Nights
(an anthology with the framing device of a newlywed woman keeping her
pretty-awful husband, the king, from executing her–just because he’s
awful–by beginning a new story each night and finishing it the following
night, until the point where he finally realizes he’s been awful and
decides not to have her killed)?

What if VIC has to keep them listening, under the pretense that there
are encrypted stories they’ll only get via his narration? And he has to
keep talking, and telling good enough stories, so that they don’t
decide to just rip out his hard drives and move on?

It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that VIC, a VI in charge
of monitoring Alpha, might have the ability to gather and store a wide
variety of Red-vs.-Blueniverse intel from a number of sources, just in
case various sim-soldier scenarios took Alpha out of the canyon. So it
could be that in this in-universe situation, these stories are still
true and not just fabrications.

And maybe VIC only needs to stall long enough for Sister to enact a
plan that involves killing or scaring away the in-universe audience.

But for now he waits, grandstands, drags things out as much as he can…

So a lot of you probably saw the Felix monologue writing exercise@Miles posted here a couple of days ago. I read it, loved it, and thought it would be a great opportunity to do some voice acting! My reading was received favorably on the tumblargz so I thought I'd share it here too :D

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Comments

Comments (1281)

Hi there! It's been a long time. You probably don't even remember me. ^^;

I was just someone on here that loved dragons and science. The last thing I remember hearing about your life was that you became a real scientist. Is that still going well? I follow you on tumblr and I haven't heard anything about that.

Mostly you just make posts about roosterteeth stuff. I'm glad to see you're still excited about this place.

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DaftProdigyFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
Tinfoil Hatter

1 year ago

Hey! Becoming a scientist is going well, I just don't blog about it much :)

I'm trying to get back into posting things here on the site. I'll probably be starting a thread for Day 5 analysis/speculation soon :D

+1 Cool

niriallFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
THE META

2 years ago

+1 Cool

DaftProdigyFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
Tinfoil Hatter

2 years ago

Oh my word that's PRECIOUS <3

Sorry I didn't notice it until now, RT had logged me out for some reason

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niriallFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
THE META

DaftProdigyFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
Tinfoil Hatter

5 years ago

It was really fun! :) Had some good times with fellow group members running around San Diego and LA, visiting shops and singing at places. We served at a soup kitchen, too, which was a cool experience.

DaftProdigyFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
Tinfoil Hatter

5 years ago

I had to disable a user-script to see the Twitter link (I'd really appreciate it if you'd share those over Skype rather than RT for this reason), but I can seez nao. Hehehe :)

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JeppeRoemerFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold

5 years ago

Present! It's been a LONG time since I drew a dragon, but I think it turned out okay. However I'll just say that your dragons are friggin' awesome. Anyway... Hope you at least find the one I drew somewhat acceptable

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DaftProdigyFIRST Member Star(s)Indication of membership status - One star is a FIRST member, two stars is Double Gold
Tinfoil Hatter

Festinger says: I could train this guy to be a better waiter. Pavlov says: I could train my dog to be a better waiter. Skinner says: That's nothing, I could train a rat to be a better waiter! Freud says: Guys, I screwed my mom and the guilt is eating me up inside.